Crying Man

Walking my dog last week, I came upon a man crying in the street. He was sitting on the raised stone ledge of a back-yard fence separating two small apartment houses, his back against the iron bars, with one hand up to his face. The dog gave him a glance and we moved on by, but when I stopped after a decent distance and looked back he’d bent forward in his misery and I could hear sobs. A thin, tall man, perhaps in his late forties, his pale face now glistening with tears. Black jeans, gray shirt, some sort of jacket. My first thought was to go back and ask if there was anything I could do. My dog is a young fox terrier, and I thought that his charm might perk up the poor guy for a moment. I held back, though, immobilized by New York’s code of privacy and because I was embarrassed. He hadn’t noticed us, and the soft sounds of his grief now seemed to be the main event on the block we were on. What had happened? What rotten news had come his way? His mother had died. His girlfriend—they’d have been together for three years, come January—had gone away to São Paulo for good, leaving a note on the kitchen table and a longer message on his e-mail. His cat Max unaccountably fell down the airshaft. His lover, who runs an art-moving business, had been hit by a bicycle on Greenwich Avenue and required neurosurgery. His job—he was a furniture restorer; an anesthesiologist; an associate curator; a cloud-computer analyst and designer; a private-school gym teacher—had been terminated by budget considerations. His father, the retired oboist, urgently needed a live-in companion with experience in dementia. I didn’t know or need to know. The dog and I resumed our tour, and I was surprised by unexpectedly remembering what crying is like.

Not that I shouldn’t have known. Weeping is visible just about every night on the evening news, around bombing sites or after violent weather events, also at memorials and candlelight vigils, or, more locally, near the end of the half hour, from neighbors of the abruptly deceased. (Women who cry in movies nowadays, and even some on the TV news, often wipe away dampness with a delicate gesture of their fingertips, to preserve eye makeup.) But my man had been crying for real, with no one else around. Men don’t want to cry, of course, because it’s unmanly. Women cry more warily than they once did, perhaps, weighing the implications. We cry at the shrink’s office, or choose not to. For grownups, tears, when they do arrive, come from a considerable distance but startle us with their familiarity. Crying has not been in the conversation, but, yes, we know how to do this. This is an old dance step; it’s swimming resumed. What’s also been forgotten and is now quickly and strongly restored is the comfort of giving way to these awkward seizures and shakings, the swift flooding and thickening of sinuses, and then our sense of shame and need for apology also giving way, if we’re lucky, to acceptance and perhaps more and still more tears, more Kleenex, and a bit of peace.

When the dog and I came back to the same place fifteen minutes later, the man had gone, and my generous thoughts about him had stopped, too. No crying today, please. No more reminders around here about this magical ten-cent restorative, and the million waiting reasons we’ll be needing it. Not right now, or next week, either. Spare us, mister—O.K.?

Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos.

Roger Angell, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956. He is the author of “Late Innings.”